Time and Narrative, Volume 2

Originally published as Temps et Récit, vol. 2,

© Editions du Seuil, 1984

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1985 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1985

Printed in the United States of America

14 13 12 11 10

9 10 11

ISBN: 978-0-226-71352-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ricoeur, Paul.

Time and narrative.

Translation of: Temps et récit.

Includes index.

1. Narration (Rhetoric)   2. Time in literature.   3. Mimesis in literature.   4. Plots (Drama, novel, etc.)   5. History—Philosophy.   I. Title.

PN212.R5213  1984    809'.923    83-17995

ISBN: 0-226-71332-6 Vol. 1 (ppbk)

ISBN: 0-226-71334-2 Vol. 2 (ppbk)

ISBN: 0-226-71336-9 Vol. 3 (ppbk)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

TIME AND NARRATIVE

VOLUME 2

PAUL RICOEUR

Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Contents

Preface

PART III: THE CONFIGURATION OF TIME IN FICTIONAL NARRATIVE

1. The Metamorphoses of the Plot

2. The Semiotic Constraints on Narrativity

3. Games with Time

4. The Fictive Experience of Time

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Preface

Volume 2 of Time and Narrative requires no special introduction. This volume contains Part III of the single work sketched out in the opening pages of volume 1. Furthermore, the theme of Part III, the configuration of time by fictional narrative, corresponds strictly to the theme of Part II in volume 1, the configuration of time by historical narrative. Part IV, which will make up my third and final volume, will bring together under the title Narrated Time the threefold testimony that is provided by phenomenology, history, and fiction concerning the power of narrative, taken in its indivisible wholeness, to refigure time.

This brief preface allows me the opportunity to add to the acknowledgments made at the beginning of Volume 1 of Time and Narrative an expression of my gratitude to the directors of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. The exceptional conditions offered to the Fellows there, allowed me, in large part, to carry out the research that led to this volume.

Part III

The Configuration of Time in Fictional Narrative

In this third part of Time and Narrative the narrative model I am considering under the title mimēsis2 is applied to a new region of the narrative field which, to distinguish it from the region of historical narrative, I am designating as fictional narrative.¹ This large subset of the field of narrative includes everything the theory of literary genres puts under the rubrics of folktale, epic, tragedy, comedy, and the novel. This list is only meant to be indicative of the kind of text whose temporal structure will be considered. Not only is this list of genres not a closed one, their provisional titles do not bind me in advance to any required classification of literary genres. This is important because my specific concerns do not require me to take a stand concerning the problems relative to the classification and the history of such genres.² So I shall adopt the most commonly accepted nomenclature as often as the status of my problem allows. In return, I am obligated from this point on to account for the characterization of this narrative subset as fictional narrative. Remaining faithful to the convention concerning vocabulary I adopted in my first volume, I am giving the term fiction a narrower extension than that adopted by the many authors who take it to be synonymous with narrative configuration.³ This equating of narrative configuration and fiction, of course, has some justification inasmuch as the configurating act is, as I myself have maintained, an operation of the productive imagination, in the Kantian sense of this term. Nevertheless I am reserving the term fiction for those literary creations that do not have historical narrative’s ambition to constitute a true narrative. If we take configuration and fiction as synonyms we no longer have a term available to account for the different relation of each of these two narrative modes to the question of truth. What historical narrative and fictional narrative do have in common is that they both stem from the same configurating operations I put under the title mimesis2. On the the hand, what opposes them to each other does not have to do with the structuring activity invested in their narrative structures as such, rather it has to do with the truth-claim that defines the third mimetic relation.

It will be useful to linger awhile on the level of this second mimetic relation between action and narrative. Unexpected convergences and divergences will then have an opportunity to take shape concerning the fate of narrative configuration in the areas of historical narrative and fictional narrative.

The four chapters of which Part III is composed themselves constitute stages along a single itinerary: by broadening, radicalizing, enriching, and opening up to the outside the notion of emplotment, handed down by the Aristotelian tradition, I shall attempt correlatively to deepen the notion of temporality handed down by the Augustinian tradition, without at the same time moving outside the framework provided by the notion of narrative configuration, hence without crossing over the boundaries of mimesis2.

1. To broaden the notion of emplotment is first of all to attest to the fact that the Aristotelian muthos has the capacity to be transformed without thereby losing its identity. The breadth of narrative understanding is measured by this mutability of emplotment. Several questions are implied by this: (a) Does a narrative genre as new as the modern novel, for example, maintain a tie with the tragic muthos, synonymous with emplotment for the Greeks, so that it can still be placed under the formal principle of concordant discordance by which I defined narrative configuration? (b) Does emplotment, through all these mutations, offer a stability that would allow it to be situated in terms of the paradigms that preserve the style of traditionality characteristic of the narrative function, at least in the cultural sphere of the Western world? (c) What is the critical threshold beyond which the most extreme deviations from this style of traditionality force upon us the hypothesis not only of a schism in relation to the narrative tradition but the death of the narrative function itself?

In this initial inquiry the question of time is dealt with only marginally, through the intervention of concepts such as novelty, stability, and decline, by which I shall attempt to characterize the identity of the narrative function without giving in to any sort of essentialism.

2. To deepen the notion of emplotment I shall confront narrative understanding, forged by our familiarity with the narratives transmitted by our culture, with the rationality employed nowadays by narratology, and in particular by the narrative semiology characteristic of the structural approach.⁴ The quarrel over priority that divides narrative understanding and semiotic rationality—a dispute we shall have to arbitrate—offers an obvious parallel with the discussion that arose in Part II concerning the epistemology of contemporary historiography and philosophy of history. We may, in fact, place on the same level of rationality both nomological explanation, which some theorists of history have claimed to substitute for the naive art of narrating, and the apprehension of the deep structures of a narrative in narrative semiotics, with respect to which the rules of emplotment are considered mere surface structures. The question arises whether we can provide the same response to this conflict over priority that we gave in the similar debate concerning history, namely, that to explain more is to understand better.

The question of time thus comes up again, but in a less peripheral manner than above. To the extent that narrative semiotics does succeed in conferring an achronic status on the deep structures of a narrative, the question arises whether its change of strategic level allows it to do justice to the most original features of narrative temporality, those I characterized in Part I as discordant concordance, by combining Augustine’s analyses of time with Aristotle’s analysis of muthos. The fate of diachrony in narratology will help us to uncover the difficulties resulting from this second cycle of questions.

3. To enrich the notion of emplotment, along with the notion of time that is related to it, is still to explore the resources of narrative configuration that seem peculiar to fictional narrative. The reasons for according this privilege to fictional narrative will appear only later, when we shall be in a position to carry through the contrast between the time of history and the time of fiction on the basis of a phenomenology of time-consciousness broader than that of Augustine.

Anticipating this great three-way debate between lived experience, historical time, and fictional time, I shall base my remarks on a noteworthy property of narrative utterance: its ability to present, within discourse itself, specific marks that distinguish it from the statement of the things narrated. The result of this, for time, is a parallel capacity of being divided into the time of the act of narrating and the time of the things narrated. The discordances between these two temporal modalities do not stem from the alternative of either achronic logic or chronological development, the two branches to which our earlier discussion was in danger of limiting itself. These discordances in fact present nonchronometric aspects which invite us to decipher in them an original—even a reflective—dimension of the distension of Augustinian time, one the division into utterance and statement is best suited to throw into relief in fictional narrative.

4. To open up the notion of emplotment—and the notion of time that corresponds to it—to the outside is to follow the movement of transcendence by which every work of fiction, whether verbal or plastic, narrative or lyric, projects a world outside of itself, one that can be called the world of the work. In this way, epics, dramas, and novels project, in the mode of fiction, ways of inhabiting the world that lie waiting to be taken up by reading, which in turn is capable of providing a space for a confrontation between the world of the text and the world of the reader. The problems of refiguration, belonging to the level of mimesis3, begin, strictly speaking, only in and through this confrontation. This is why the notion of the world of the text seems to me still to be part of the problem of narrative configuration, although it paves the way for the transition from mimesis2 to mimesis3.

A new relation between time and fiction corresponds to this notion of the world of the text. And it is, to my mind, the most decisive one. I shall not hesitate to speak here, despite the obvious paradox of the expression, of the fictive experience of time in order to express the properly temporal aspects of the world of the text and the ways of inhabiting the world that the text projects outside of itself.⁵ The status of the expression fictive experience is most precarious. On the one hand, in effect, our temporal ways of inhabiting the world remain imaginary to the extent that they exist only in and through the text. On the other hand, they constitute a sort of transcendence within immanence that is precisely what allows for the confrontation with the world of the reader.⁶

1

The Metamorphoses of the Plot

The precedence of our narrative understanding in the epistemological order, as it will be defended in the following chapter in light of the rationalizing ambitions of narratology, can only be attested to and maintained if we initially give this narrative understanding a scope such that it may be taken as the original which narratology strives to copy. It follows that my task is not an easy one. The Aristotelian theory of plot was conceived during an age when only tragedy, comedy, and epic were recognized as genres worthy of philosophical reflection. But new types have appeared even within the tragic, comic, and epic genres, types that may make us doubt whether a theory of plot appropriate for the poetic practice of ancient writers still works for such new works as Don Quixote or Hamlet. What is more, new genres have appeared, in particular the novel, that have turned literature into an immense laboratory for experiments in which, sooner or later, every received convention has been set aside. We might ask, therefore, whether plot has not become a category of such limited extension, and such an out-of-date reputation, as has the novel in which the plot predominates. Furthermore, the evolution of literature has not been confined to producing new types in old genres or even new genres within the constellation of literary forms. Its adventure seems to have brought it to blur the limits between genres, and to contest the very principle of order that is the root of the idea of plot. What is in question today is the very idea of a relationship between an individual work and every received paradigm.¹ Is it not true that plot is disappearing from the horizon of literature inasmuch as the very contours of the most basic distinction among the modes of composition, the one having to do with mimetic composition, are being wiped out?

It is a matter of some urgency therefore that we test the capacity of the plot to be transformed beyond its initial sphere of application in Aristotle’s Poetics, and that we identify the threshold beyond which this concept loses all its discriminating value.

This investigation of the boundaries within which the concept of plot remains valid finds a guide in the analysis of mimesis2 that I proposed in Part 1 of this work.² That analysis contains rules for generalizing the concept of plot that now have to be made explicit.³

BEYOND THE TRAGIC MUTHOS

Plot was first defined, on the most formal level, as an integrating dynamism that draws a unified and complete story from a variety of incidents, in other words, that transforms this variety into a unified and complete story. This formal definition opens a field of rule-governed transformations worthy of being called plots so long as we can discern temporal wholes bringing about a synthesis of the heterogeneous between circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. This is why a historian such as Paul Veyne could assign to a considerably enlarged notion of plot the function of integrating components of social change as abstract as those brought to light by non-event-oriented history and even by serial history. Literature should be able to present expansions of the same scale. The space for this interplay is opened by the hierarchy of paradigms referred to above: types, genres, forms. We may formulate the hypothesis that these metamorphoses of the plot consist of new instantiations of the formal principle of temporal configuration in hitherto unknown genres, types, and individual works.

It is within the realm of the modern novel that the pertinence of the concept of emplotment seems to have been contested the most. The modern novel, indeed, has, since its creation, presented itself as the protean genre par excellence. Called upon to respond to a new and rapidly changing social situation, it soon escaped the paralyzing control of critics and censors.⁴ Indeed, it has constituted for at least three centuries now a prodigious workshop for experiments in the domains of composition and the expression of time.⁵

The major obstacle the novel had first to confront, then completely overcome, was a doubly erroneous conception of plot. It was erroneous first because it was simply transposed from two of the already constituted genres, epic and drama, then because classical art, especially in France, had imposed on these two genres a mutilated and dogmatic version of the rules from Aristotle’s Poetics. It will suffice here to recall, on the one hand, the limiting and constraining interpretation given the rule about the unity of time, as it was understood in chapter 7 of the Poetics, and, on the other hand, the strict requirement to begin in media res, as Homer did in the Odyssey, then to move backward to account for the present situation, so as to distinguish clearly the literary from the historical narrative, which was held to descend the course of time, leading its characters uninterruptedly from birth to death, filling all the intervals of its time span with narration.

Under the eye of these rules, frozen into a supercilious didacticism, plot could only be conceived of as an easily readable form, closed in on itself, symmetrically arranged in terms of an ending, and based on an easily identifiable causal connection between the initial complication and its denouement; in short, as a form where the episodes would clearly be held together by the configuration.

One important corollary of this overly narrow conception of plot especially contributed to the misunderstanding of the formal principle of emplotment. Whereas Aristotle had subordinated characters to plot, taken as the encompassing concept in relation to the incidents, characters, and thoughts, in the modern novel we see the notion of character overtake that of plot, becoming equal with it, then finally surpass it entirely.

This revolution in the history of genres came about for good reasons. Indeed, it is under the rubric of character that we may situate three noteworthy expansions within the genre of the novel.

First, exploiting the breakthrough that had occurred with the picaresque tale, the novel considerably extends the social sphere in which its action unfolds. It is no longer the great deeds or misdeeds of legendary or famous characters but the adventures of ordinary men and women that are to be recounted.

The English novel of the eighteenth century testifies to this invasion of literature by ordinary people. Furthermore, the story seems to have moved toward the episodic form through its emphasis on the interactions arising out of a much more differentiated social fabric, in particular through the innumerable imbrications of its dominant theme of love with money, reputation, and social and moral codes—in short, with an infinitely ramified praxis.⁶

The second expansion of character, at the expense of the plot, or so it seems, is illustrated by the Bildungsroman, which reached its high point with Schiller and Goethe and which continued into the opening third of the twentieth century.⁷ Everything seems to turn on the self-awakening of the central character. First, it is his gaining maturity that provides the narrative framework; then, more and more, his doubts, his confusion, his difficulty in finding himself and his place in the world govern the development of this type of story. However, throughout this development, what was essentially asked of the narrated story was that it knit together social and psychological complexity. This new enlargement proceeds directly from the preceding one. Narrative technique in the golden age of the novel in the nineteenth cenury, from Balzac to Tolstoy, had anticipated this by drawing on the resources of an old narrative formula which consisted of deepening a character by narrating more and drawing from the richness of a character the exigency of a greater episodic complexity. In this sense, character and plot mutally influence each other.⁸

Another new source of complexity has appeared in the twentieth century, in particular with the stream-of-consciousness novel, so marvelously illustrated by a work of Virginia Woolf, a masterpiece from the point of view of the perception of time, which I shall look at in more detail below.⁹ What now holds the center of attention is the incompleteness of personality, the diversity of the levels of the conscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious, the stirring of unformulated desires, the inchoative and evanescent character of feelings. The notion of plot here seems to be especially in trouble. Can we still talk about a plot when the exploration of the abysses of consciousness seems to reveal the inability of even language to pull itself together and take shape?

Yet nothing in these successive expansions of character at the expense of the plot escapes the formal principle of configuration and therefore the concept of emplotment. I will even dare to say that nothing in them takes us beyond the Aristotelian definition of muthos as the imitation of an action. As the breadth of the plot increases, so does that of action. By action we have to understand more than the behavior of the protagonists that produces visible changes in their situation or their fortune, what might be called their external appearance. Action, in this enlarged sense, also includes the moral transformation of characters, their growth and education, and their initiation into the complexity of moral and emotional existence. It also includes, in a still more subtle sense, purely internal changes affecting the temporal course of sensations and emotions, moving ultimately to the least organized, least conscious level introspection can reach.

The concept of an imitation of action can thus be extended beyond the action novel, in the strict sense of the term, to include novels oriented toward character or toward an idea, in the name of the encompassing nature of plot in relation to the more narrowly defined categories of incident, character, or thought. The sphere delimited by the concept of mimēsis praxeōs extends as far as does the capacity of narrative to render its object by strategies giving rise to singular wholes capable of producing their particular pleasure through an interplay of inferences, expectations, and emotional responses on the reader’s part. In this sense, the modern novel teaches us to extend the notion of an imitated or represented action to the point where we can say that a formal principle of composition governs the series of changes affecting beings similar to us—be they individual or collective, the bearers of a proper name as in the nineteenth-century novel, or just designated by an initial (K) as in Kafka, or even, at the limit, unnameable as in Beckett.

The history of the genre novel does not require us, therefore, to give up the term plot as designating the correlate of narrative understanding. However we must not stop with these historical considerations concerning the extension of this genre if we are to understand the apparent defeat of the plot. There is a less obvious reason for this reduction of the concept of plot to that of mere story-line—or schema or summary of the incidents. If the plot, once reduced to this skeleton, could appear to be an external constraint, even an artificial and finally an arbitrary one, it is because, since the birth of the novel through the end of its golden age in the nineteenth century, a more urgent problem than that of the art of composition occupied the foreground: the problem of verisimilitude. The substitution of one problem for the other was facilitated by the fact that the conquest of verisimilitude took place under the banner of the struggle against conventions, especially against what plot was supposed to be, on the basis of epic, tragedy, and comedy in their ancient, Elizabethan, and classical (in the French sense of this term) forms. To struggle against these conventions and for verisimilitude constituted one and the same battle. It was this concern for being true—in the sense of being faithful—to reality, or for equating art and life, that most contributed to covering over the problems of narrative composition.

And yet these problems were not abolished. They were only displaced. To see this, it suffices to reflect upon the variety of novelistic procedures used to satisfy this requirement to depict life in its everyday truth in the early days of the English novel. For example, Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, made recourse to a pseudo-autobiographical form, through imitation of the innumerable diaries, memoires, and genuine autobiographies published during the same period by people shaped by the Calvinist discipline of daily self-examination. Following him, Richardson, in Pamela and Clarissa, believed he could depict private experience—for example, the conflicts between romantic love and the institution of marriage—with even greater fidelity by using as artificial a device as the exchange of letters, despite its evident disadvantages: little selective power, the encroachment of insignificant matters and garrulity, much marching in place and repetition.¹⁰ But, to Richardson, the advantages won out without any need for discussion. By having his heroine immediately write things down, he could convey the impression of great closeness between writing and feeling. Moreover, use of the present tense contributed to this impression of immediacy, thanks to the almost simultaneous transcription of what was felt and its circumstances. At the same time, the unsolvable difficulties of the pseudo-autobiography, dependent as it was on the resources of an unbelievable memory, were eliminated. Finally, this method allowed the reader to participate in the psychological situation presupposed by the very use of an exchange of letters, the subtle mixture of retreats and outpourings that occupy the mind of anyone who decides to confide in writing her or his intimate feelings. On the side of the reader, we find in response to this, the no less subtle mixture arising from the indiscretion of peeking through the keyhole, so to speak, and the impunity that goes with solitary reading.

No doubt what prevented these novelists from reflecting upon the artifice of these conventions, which was the price to be paid in their quest for the probable, was the conviction they shared with empiricist philosophers of language from Locke to Reid that language could be purged of every figurative and decorative element and returned to its original vocation—the vocation, according to Locke, to convey the knowledge of things. This confidence in the spontaneously referential function of language, returned to its literal usage, is no less important than the will to return conceptual thought to its presumed origin in experience of the particular. In truth, this will could not exist without this confidence. How, indeed, render the experience of the particular by language, if language cannot be brought back to the pure referentiality attached to its presumed literalness?

It is a fact that, once transposed into the realm of literature, this return to experience and to simple and direct language led to the creation of a new genre, defined by the proposal to establish the most exact correspondence possible between the literary work and the reality it imitates.¹¹ Implicit in this project is the reduction of mimesis to imitation, in the sense of making a copy, a sense totally foreign to Aristotle’s Poetics. It is not surprising, therefore, that neither the pseudo-autobiography nor the epistolary formula really provided any problem for their users. Memory was not suspected of being fallacious, whether the hero recounted something after the fact or as directly from the scene. For Locke and Hume themselves, memory was the support for causality and for personal identity. Hence to render the texture of daily life as closely as possible was taken to be an accessible and, finally, not problematic task.

It is no small paradox that it was reflection on the highly conventional character of such novelistic discourse that finally led to reflection on the formal conditions of this very illusion of proximity and, thereby, led to the recognition of the basically fictive status of the novel itself. After all, the instantaneous, spontaneous, and frank transcription of experience in the epistolary novel is no less conventional than the recalling of the past by a supposedly infallible memory in the pseudo-autobiographical novel. The epistolary genre presupposes, in fact, that it is possible to transfer through writing, with no loss of persuasive power, the force of representation attached to the living voice or theatrical action. To the belief, expressed by Locke, in the direct referential value of language stripped of ornaments and figures is added the belief in the authority of the printed word substituted for the absence of the living voice.¹² Perhaps it was necessary that at first the declared aim of being probable had to be confused with the aim of representing the reality of life so that too narrow and too artificial a conception of plot could be wiped out, and that subsequently the problems of composition should be brought out by reflection on the formal conditions of a truthful representation. In other words, perhaps it was necessary to overthrow the conventions in the name of the probable in order to discover that the price to be paid for doing so is an increase in the refinement of composition, hence the invention of ever more complex plots, and, in this sense, ones more and more distant from reality and from life.¹³ Whatever may be said about this alleged cunning of reason in the history of the genre of the novel, the paradox remains that it was refinement in narrative technique, called for by the concern for faithfulness to everyday reality, that brought attention to what Aristotle called, in the broad sense, the imitation of an action in terms of the organization of the events in a plot. What conventions or what artifices are not required to put life into writing, that is, to compose a persuasive simulacrum in writing?

It is a great paradox, one that will not be fully unfolded until we consider the connection between configuration and refiguration, that the empire of conventions should grow in proportion to the representative ambition of the novel during its longest period, that of the realistic form. In this sense, the three steps broadly defined above—the novel of action, of character, of thought—mark out a twofold history: that of the conquest of new regions by the formal principle of configuration, but also that of the discovery of the increasingly conventional character of this undertaking. This second history, this history in counterpoint, is the history of the prise de conscience of the novel as the art of fiction, to use Henry James’s famous title.

During the first phase, formal vigilance remained subordinated to the realist motivation that engendered it. It was even concealed by the representative intention. Verisimilitude is still a province of truth—its image or its semblance. And the best resemblance was what best approximated the familiar, the ordinary, the everyday, in opposition to the amazing deeds of the epic or the sublime ones of classical drama. The fate of the plot thus depended upon this almost desperate effort to bring the artifice of novelistic composition asymptotically close to a reality that slipped away in proportion to the formal exigencies of composition that it multiplied. Everything happened as though only ever more complex conventions could approach what was natural and true, as if the growing complexity of these conventions made this very reality recede into an inaccessible horizon that art wanted to equal and to render. This is why the call for verisimilitude could not long hide the fact that verisimilitude is not just resemblance to truth but also a semblance of truth. This fine distinction was to deepen into an abyss. Indeed, insofar as the novel was recognized as the art of fiction, reflection on the formal conditions for the production of this fiction entered into open competition with the realistic motivation behind which these conditions first lay concealed. The golden age of the novel in the nineteenth century may be characterized by a precarious equilibrium between the always more strongly affirmed aim of faithfulness to reality and the ever sharper awareness of the artifice behind a successful composition.

One day this equilibrium had to be lost. If, indeed, resemblance is only a semblance of truth, what then is fiction under the rule of this semblance but the ability to create the belief that this artifice stands for genuine testimony about reality and life? The art of fiction then turns out to be the art of illusion. From here on, awareness of the artifice involved undermines from within the realist motivation, finally turning against it and destroying it.

Today it is said that only a novel without a plot or characters or any discernible temporal organization is more genuinely faithful to experience, which is itself fragmented and inconsistent, than was the traditional novel of the nineteenth century. But this plea for a fragmented, inconsistent fiction is not justified any differently than was the plea for naturalistic literature. The argument for verisimilitude has merely been displaced. Formerly, it was social complexity that called for abandoning the classical paradigm; today, it is the presumed incoherence of reality that requires abandoning every paradigm. But then literature, by reduplicating the chaos of reality by that of fiction, returns mimesis to its weakest function—that of replicating what is real by copying it. Fortunately, the paradox remains that in multiplying its artifices fiction seals its capitulation.

We may then ask whether the initial paradox has not been turned upside down. In the beginning, it was the representative intention that motivated the convention. At the end, the awareness of the illusion subverts the convention and motivates an effort to break away from every paradigm. The questions of the limits and perhaps of the exhaustion of the metamorphoses of plot stem from this reversal.

PERENNIALITY: AN ORDER OF PARADIGMS?

The preceding discussion bore on the capacity for expansion of the formal principle of figuration as this functions in the plot, beyond its initial exemplification in Aristotle’s Poetics. This